Astar
A night-sky star map and constellation finder app.
- Client
- Motto product
- Year
- 2026
- Platforms
- iOS · iPadOS · Android
Challenge
Astar needed to launch across the App Store and Google Play with a name, subtitle and icon that would hold up in 17 Apple locales and 24 Google Play storefronts at once, while looking equally right in the light, dark and tinted modes of Apple's new Home Screen icon system.
Solution
We designed the icon to look equally right across light, dark and tinted modes. The store identity ("Astar Star Map Night Sky Guide" / "Constellation Finder & Notes") was written to fit Apple's 30-character limits exactly, and the 6-screen iPhone and 5-screen iPad sequences were built to repeat across every supported market.
Astar's icon is built as an Apple layered icon rather than a single flattened image: a glass-textured gold star sits above a black circle, both suspended on a dark gradient backdrop. Icon Composer keeps the star and the circle as separate elements, so the system can shift their scale and light independently. The star sits at 1.05x, the circle at 1.08x, so neither reads as flat against the other. At render time, Apple's engine takes the same two layers and produces the light, dark and tinted variants the OS actually ships, without a separate export per mode.
Icon layers
- Black circle
- Gold star
iPhone screenshots are shown in four locales: English, Turkish, Japanese and Arabic. In production the same 6-screen sequence ships across 16 App Store markets. The iPad set is English only for now. Localized screenshots for the other locales haven’t been produced yet.
- enEnglish
- trTürkçe
- ja日本語
- arالعربيةRTL
24 storefronts
Live in 17 Apple locales and 24 Google Play storefronts; shown here are the four editorial showcase locales: English, Turkish, Japanese and Arabic.
The store identity was written to fill Apple's 30-character limits exactly: the name field ("Astar Star Map Night Sky Guide") uses 30 of 30 characters, the subtitle ("Constellation Finder & Notes") 28 of 30. No wasted space in either field.
Astar Star Map Night Sky Guide
Constellation Finder & Notes
Astar Star Map Night Sky Guide
Constellation Finder & Notes
Reference
